Desk of Ladyada - Drivers, Tachyons & Heat Sinks – Oh Boy!

Adafruit Industries

Fresh drivers for Bosch BMP5xx sensors & LiPoly chargers, plus Particle Tachyon fun with web-console shell + Blinka support! Also, heat sink tips for TO-220s. This week at our desk we cranked through a whole mess of drivers. Starting with the BMP580/BMP581/BMP585 series, which had a proper Bosch driver library (https://github.com/boschsensortec/BMP5_SensorAPI) so we wrappered it with Claude (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_BMP5xx) to make a nice Adafruit-y library with I2C/SPI and IRQ support. We plan to stock all three variants of the chip since the driver is the same for all. Then we cranked through the bq25628e (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/BQ25628ERYKR/21298592) which is a nice buck-mode LiPoly charger with I2C monitoring and up to 2A rate - the I2C driver (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_bq25628e) was kinda long but it's nice to have monitoring built in so no separate lipoly gas gauge is needed. we're using this as practice while we try to get through the bigger/more complex bq25798 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/BQ25798RQMR/15666783) driver (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_bq25798). We also got more time to play with our Tachyon: one thing that is really impressive is the web-console shell access! It solves a common issue with Pi's where getting initial access can be frustrating. Using the PiStemma (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6365) and the Crickit instructions (https://developer.particle.io/tachyon/accessories/adafruit-crickit-hat) we are able to get Blinka + CircuitPython libraries going. We'll get those mainlined next week! And on The Great Search: TO-220 Heat Sink: https://youtu.be/uyvxSyJLR00